Friday, December 7, 2012

Also discussed is the fact that Saddle Creek recently reissued Danse Macabre, the 2001 album by The Faint. Which tops the Interpol reish for absurdity and then some. Did anyone even remember that record by the end of the year it came out?

Ott, he don't pull no punches, even though he liked the Faint a bit at the time:

"The situation with Danse Macabre is that No Doubt took them
on tour as an opener to buy their “cred”, as it were, in 2002. And so,
as far as The Faint goes, that was the biggest thing that ever happened
to them, in their entire career. But I suspect those audiences don’t
remember it that way, and that they didn’t make a lot of fans off that
decision. When Saddle Creek and The Faint look back on ten years ago,
perhaps they remember that tour and maybe almost getting mainstream
attention. But The Faint weren’t My Chemical Romance, and it was never
going to happen. There’s a very distorted memory there, in trying to
celebrate Danse Macabre and that moment, which I experienced as a complete failure. "

Of course the real point is that both bands were unoriginal, derivative of an earlier age of music, and of specific bands to boot. And just as you can't have a revival of a revival (well, No Doubt as participants in a late 90s ska-revival revival maybe disproves that, but it's the exception that proves the rule), so too an Anniversary Reissue of a piece of music that wasn't in its own time a Broader Sociocultural Event (e.g. The Slider 40th Anniversary mega-box) NOR has it subsequently become Iconic through Steadily Accruing Cult Love, Ahead of Its Time Stature and Influentialness (as with the Velvet Underground and Nico's 45th Anniversary mega-expanded box), it just don't make no sense! It's just a record that came out, to modest impact, that has since never been out of print and is still readily available with unsold copies lingering all over the place, and, as Ott notes, is on iTunes and Spotify and the rest.

So why then? It's just a marketing ploy, says Ott:

"I look at the reissue thing as a way for the classic, outmoded music
industry to toot its own horn and say, “We might have a way here to
force the gatekeeper websites to promote our catalog.” Advertising is
everything; so, in a way, the reissue is a very powerful advertisement
for catalog sales. Catalog sales dwarf new music sales in terms of
physical media: they overtook them this year, statistically, along every
measurable line. But it was already the case for ages: that’s why Billboard
had the “Heatseeker” bullshit inside the chart, so your new hip-hop
protégé doesn’t notice his record is two positions lower than an old
Michael Bolton album."